Plugins/User-Extensions for Swing-Designer

[Guest]

Is it possible to extend the functionality of Swing-Designer
via a plugin-interface or some kind of API?

Thanks,
Lophiomys

[Eric Clayberg]

Is it possible to extend the functionality of Swing-Designer via a plugin-interface or some kind of API?

No...or at least not yet. We ae considering adding a plugin interface.

What sort of functionality did you want to add?

[lophiomys]

I am thinking of some kind of data binding features and GUI object interfacing,
same which I used (and participated to develop) on an other GUI-IDE for Win32.

I would want to extend the Gui-Object palette to accept and recognise
special visual objects (propably extending JComponent), which would
offer a design time view, and then also to display some extra properties/events
applicalbe to all objects of this kin, with some control about code generation,
in order to integrate an setup these components within a RT-framework.

Kind Regards,
Lophiomys

[Eric Clayberg]

I am thinking of some kind of data binding features and GUI object interfacing, same which I used (and participated to develop) on an other GUI-IDE for Win32. I would want to extend the Gui-Object palette to accept and recognise special visual objects (propably extending JComponent), which would offer a design time view, and then also to display some extra properties/events applicalbe to all objects of this kin, with some control about code generation, in order to integrate an setup these components within a RT-framework.

Have you tried doing this through the standard Java BeanInfo interface (which Designer uses for Swing widgets)?

You can add special data-aware components to the palette that would expose custom properties for handling the data binding.

Custom properties, editors and code generation are supported in Designer via the BeanInfo interface.

[lophiomys]

Eric,
Thanks for the info,
I'll have a look at it.
Cheers

[Eric Clayberg]

Thanks for the info,
I'll have a look at it.

Here are a couple of simple classes implementing a custom button with a couple of custom BeanInfo properties (see below).

http://www.instantiations.com/swing-designer/files/swing_custom.zip

Just copy these into one of your projects and open the TestCustomPropertyEditors in Designer.